


Cold working

by someinstant



Series: Foundry [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Related, Episode: s08e01 Winterfell, F/M, Pining, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 15:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18626128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someinstant/pseuds/someinstant
Summary: She was exactly as he thought she’d be, which was to say: changed beyond measure, just like him.





	Cold working

He was too fucking cold to think of her at first, following Clegane and Ser Davos through the North Gate into the relative windbreak of the courtyard. The packed snow and ice sheeted off his cloak to shatter at his feet as he slid off the saddle, inelegant and tangled in the stirrups.  Clegane dismounted in a single motion and shook his head.

“That poor bloody horse,” he said, stomping off to gods knew where, the confusion of men and woodsmoke and horses parting around him.

Gendry scowled and patted the roan with a hand that felt like it belonged to someone else.  “Sorry, girl,” he said, low. She blew a patient whicker against his glove, likely glad to have his ungainly arse off her back.  A stable boy ran up, fur-covered and smudge-faced, and he handed the reins over, glad the beast would be cared for by someone who knew what they were doing.  There hadn’t been much cause for a Flea Bottom bastard to learn about fine horseflesh.

“You’ve not much of a seat, have you,” Ser Davos said, handing off his own mount.  He put his hand to his back and grimaced.

“Not much, no,” Gendry agreed.  “No more than you.” He stomped his feet idly, wondering how badly they would hurt when the feeling came prickling back.

“Comes of all the smuggling,” Davos said.  “Tides and winds, I knew before I could walk. Riding, I just hold on and hope not to fall off.”  His eyes scanned the balustrades; the highborn had retreated inside Winterfell’s thick walls before the trailing ranks passed through its gates.

Gendry felt his mouth attempt a smile, small and cracked with wind.  “The cold doesn’t help,” he said.

“It does not,” Davos said.  “I have been told that the North is lovely, and have seen enough of it over the years to suspect it might be true in its own wild way-- but gods’ teeth and tits, my bones ache.  Northerners are a strange breed.”

“Aye,” Gendry said.  “I’ve never known a sensible one.”  A bedraggled boy in an outsized leather jerkin ran past, cheeks red like winter apples, and for a moment Gendry felt the green warmth of the Riverlands around him, a small voice saying, _Yoren is taking me home to Winterfell_.

“I must go and do the pretty,” Davos said, and tilted his head towards the Great Hall.  Gendry followed him towards the towering oaken doors. “I owe Lady Stark a proper greeting, and have yet to meet the brother or sister.  Odd,” he said, “to worry about giving offense with the dead hounding us, but there we are. The world at its end, and we keep fucking bowing.”  He nodded to the two guards at the door; they nodded back in recognition.

“There we are,” Gendry echoed, and put his hand on the scarred wood of the great door.  Arya was in there, most like, a lady grown, a stranger, and back among her family. It was good to know that, he decided. He pushed the door open, a heavy, reluctant weight, and held it for the old man, noticing the way one of the hinges dragged slightly. An easy thing to fix for any castle smith, and easier still to ignore in the face of war.  Davos waited for him just inside.

“Coming, son?” he asked.  “You served with her brother north of the Wall; Lady Stark wouldn’t begrudge you a chance to warm yourself.”

Gendry shook his head.  “Only one place for a smith before a battle,” he told him.  Not cowardice: practicality. “There’s work that needs doing.  And besides,” he said, “the forge will be a damn sight warmer than a pile of stones, I wager.”

“I’ll tell Snow where to find you, then,” Davos said.  “I imagine he’ll want to speak with you about defenses.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, and let the door start to swing slowly closed.

“Try not to let your bollocks freeze solid, son,” Davos called, and Gendry laughed.  Said, “Too fucking late,” and the soldier nearest him snorted in commiseration as the door dragged shut with a groan from the hinges.  “It been doing that long?” Gendry asked the soldier, who shrugged.

“As long as I’ve been here,” he said.  “Few months at least.”

Gendry scoffed.  “Years, I’d say.”  He tapped his foot against the bottom of the door where the wood was ragged from dragging over flagstones.  “Which way’s the forge? I can make a new pin for that hinge and have it fixed in a mark if someone will help me prop the door while I switch the bent one out.”

The soldier pointed to the far end of the courtyard, past the baker’s ovens.  “There,” he said. “It’s mostly strikers, since the Bolton lot’s gone. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do,” Gendry said, and turned to go.  “I’ll be back later for the door.”

“Doesn’t seem worth the bother,” the soldier said.

“It isn’t,” Gendry agreed.  Weapons to make, the dead on the march, the world at its end.  He looked over his shoulder at the stone curtain, hung with the Stark sigil.  “But I’m still fucking bowing.”

* * *

  “We thought them dead,” Snow had said at Eastwatch, the twist of parchment in his hand shaking. “We had talked to the stonemason about statues in the crypt, even if we didn’t have their bones.” His pale face, usually dour, had been lit from within as though by dragonfire.  “We hadn’t begun, though,” he had said, voice thick, “because neither of us could remember their faces. It’s been so long. None of the drawings were right.”

A round little face with a sharp chin.  Grey eyes, and brows like gulls wings. Clenched fists.  A tiny thing full of anger and fear and and more courage than sense.  She was easy to remember, Gendry had thought. Snow must have worked hard to forget.

* * *

The Winterfell forges were much like the castle itself: solid and practical, a hive of activity, and trying to recover from years of misuse by foreign hands.  

“Who’s in charge here?” Gendry had asked the day he arrived, only to find out that the answer was no one, not really.  There were men who knew the trade well enough, aye, but no masters to direct the working. Two days in, and Gendry was still trying to feel the place out.

“Been getting on just fine without ‘em,” grunted a heavy-set bearded fellow.  Falden, he’d said his name was, and Gendry had had a brief moment of envy for the warmth the man’s beard must provide him before thinking of the stink of burning hair back in the forges at King’s Landing. Better to be close shorn in a forge.

“I’ve no doubt,” Gendry said, placating.  He didn’t mind a scrap, but a fight in a smithy was like to turn ugly.  “No use for masters, myself. But is there anyone here who knows how to work with dragonglass beyond what we’ve done?”  The shipments were beginning to arrive, and there were glossy black piles growing around the forge, shining like oil in the red light-- and too few miles between the dead and the living.  Thus far, they’d been affixing knapped points of the stuff to spears for the smallfolk, but swords and axes were what was required.

“Never done it myself,” Falden admitted.  “Is there a trick to it?”

“I’ve no bloody idea,” Gendry said.  “But it kills the dead, so we’d best learn fast.”  He thought for a moment, then asked, “Is there a glassmith here? Or nearby?  I know steel well enough, but not glass. We need some help. I don’t know if blowing or casting is wanted, or if we need charcoal or coke, or if we can strike it at all.”

Falden collared a weed of a lad, maybe fourteen or fifteen and stretched thin as vellum, and told him to send a cart to Master Hale in Winter’s Town.  “Tell ‘im to bring his trade with ‘im,” Falden said. “Mean old shit,” he told Gendry, “but ‘e knows glass.”

“What if ‘e says ‘e won’t?” the boy asked, twisting soot-darkened hands in his apron.  

“Tell him the Warden of the North requires him at Winterfell,” Snow said from the shadows of the doorway, and the boy nodded and ran off like a spooked hare.

“Milord,” said Falden, pulling on his forelock.  Gendry remembered himself a moment later, ducking his head.

Snow looked uncomfortable at the deference.  He tilted his chin towards the wall. “Walk with me a moment, would you, Waters?”

“Of course, my lord,” he said, following.  He picked up his cloak as they made their way past the storeroom. In King’s Landing, stepping outside of the forge brought a seven-blessed chill; in Winterfell, the sweat on his skin started to freeze before he crossed the courtyard.

“Warm enough?” Snow asked when they stopped along the north wall, looking over the parapet.

“Fuck off, my lord,” Gendry said, and wrapped his hands tightly in the wool, regretting his lack of gloves.  The skin at his knuckles was broken and bloodied from the blistering heat of the forge crossed with the icy air.  He’d begged a pot of goose tallow from the kitchens the night previous, the scullery maids cooing over him as he showed the cracked wreck of his hands.

Snow laughed.  “Glad to see you enjoying the North so well.”

“It’s pretty enough,” he admitted.  Sharp and spare and keen like a fine steel blade, with a wind that didn’t know how to lie.  No wonder it had been so easy to spot Arry for a girl: the North was nothing if not direct, and he was coming to understand that Arya had been nothing if not of the North.

“It’s not for everyone,” Snow said, and Gendry tried not to think of the slight grey figure he’d seen flickering at the edges of his vision for the past two days.

“No,” he agreed.  “It isn’t.” They were silent a moment, and then Gendry said, “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, my lord, but was there something you wanted?”

“Only to see how you were getting on with the dragonglass,” Snow said.  And then, “I should have thought to send for a glassmith beforetimes. It was stupid not to.  I’m glad you thought to ask Falden.”

“I’m glad he didn’t punch me for asking,” Gendry said. "He's bigger than me, and you Northern lot are mad."

Snow smiled thinly.  “He’s a rough man,” he said.  “But he knows skill when he sees it.  As do I. And I owe you a debt,” he said.  “When this is over, if we make it through-- there’s a place here for you if you want it. Winterfell will need good men, and I’ve a sword I want you to make.”

Gendry glanced at the scabbard at Snow’s hip.  “Is there aught wrong with Longclaw?”

Snow shook his head.  “No. It wouldn’t be for me-- for my sister, Arya. I gave her a sword when she was a child, but she needs something better now she’s grown.”

Gendry looked at the open white waste stretching north to the Wall-- the broken Wall, he supposed.  It was enough to make a man feel small, and lost, and adrift. Around the forge, the men had been saying the dead were three days’ hard marching away.  They were probably wrong; the dead didn’t rest. He thought about the coming battle, the ring of a hammer on good steel, about a girl telling him to stand sideface to make a smaller target.

“If we make it through,” he said. “I’ll stay, and make her a sword.”

* * *

 The men said a lot of things around the forge.  They said Lady Stark was lovelier than flame; that she was stonehearted; that she was calculating and canny; that she was sweet and pious and rare; that she was good to the poor; that she was a stuck up viper of a highborn. They said all of this in the same admiring, worshipful tone, and Gendry understood this to mean that they would die for her, and gladly.

“What of her sister?” he asked Falden, pouring molten dragonglass into a cast for Clegane’s battleaxe under Master Hale’s direction.

“They say she cut Lord Baelish’s throat in the middle of the Great Hall and didn’t blink,” Falden said.  He struck the sword edge he was finishing harder than he should have and a crescent of dragonglass spun off to glow on the packed dirt floor.  

“She moves like a ghost,” said Polym, a striker with a shiny burn up half his left arm.  “It ain’t natural.”

“She fought Brienne of Tarth and didn’t die,” offered a soldier waiting for his weapon.  

“You make her sound like some sort of giantess,” Gendry said, hiding a smile as Falden shook his head and said, “She’s a slip of a thing. ‘S why it’s so unnerving.”

* * *

 The men at the forge were right; she was still a slip of a thing, ghostlike and sharp when she finally stopped flitting around the shadows and came to see him.  Her face was pale and round, like he remembered, with a sharp little chin, stubborn as the grave. Grey eyes, with brows like gull wings. Pretty enough. It flustered him more than he had thought it might, seeing her head-on.  She was exactly as he thought she’d be, which was to say: changed beyond measure, just like him.

Clegane called her a cold little bitch. It might have been a compliment; she didn’t seem to mind.

Gendry called her milady and a little rich girl, and she smiled and argued with him and told him to make her a weapon to fight the dead.

After she left, Gendry studied the parchment in his hand, and thought about how much he’d rather make her a sword to fight the living.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here I am in a fandom I've never wanted to write for, but: if HBO is going to give me Arya and Gendry, I am going to take it and run a mile with it.
> 
> Couple of things.
> 
> 1\. Yeah, yeah, this isn't how Davos enters Winterfell in 8x01, I know. I just don't care.  
> 2\. Shhh I also don't care how time works in this show.  
> 3\. We're calling this a standalone for now, depending on how my heart breaks tomorrow.
> 
> ETA:
> 
> 4\. Okay, no, it's a series now. Dammit.


End file.
